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Follow the life of the last man on the moon

Eugene Cernan's career was by any measure a triumph but a new profile spares a thought for the people left in his wake

Eugene Cernan: for now, the last man to walk on the moon

Mark Craig

By Mick O'Hare

The Last Man on the Moon, directed by Mark Craig, is on release in UK cinemas

THERE’S an old movie saying: never work with children or animals. It seems astronauts should be added to that list. It’s their egos, you see – they always get in the way. And despite Eugene Cernan’s half-hearted denials, there are family members, friends and colleagues lining up to attest to the overwhelming “strength” of his character.

Not that Cernan isn’t a likeable chap – he most certainly is – but he was a man who knew what he wanted and what he’d have to do to get there. Which sometimes meant leaving those who cared about him trailing in his wake.

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“If you think going to the moon is hard, you should try stayin’ home,” says his ex-wife Barbara Cernan Butler. In the end she told him: “It’s your life, it’s what you want. But I don’t want it.” And Cernan became one of the 60 per cent of Apollo astronauts who got a divorce. “We were unfair,” he admits, “selfish.” But they got to where they wanted to go.

And his story, The Last Man on the Moon, goes some way to explaining how the life of an astronaut in the midst of the space race between the US and the Soviet Union was always going to be incompatible with being a regular family guy.

For a start, there was the danger: once, spacewalking on the Gemini 9 mission, Cernan was stuck outside his capsule. “I was helpless,” he says, and his vital signs were “driving the doctors bananas”. There was the exhilaration: Cernan travelled faster than any other human when his Apollo 10 capsule reached 24,791 miles per hour in 1969. And then there was inevitable tragedy. It’s impossible not to be moved by Betty Grissom – wife of Virgil Grissom and friend and neighbour of the Cernans – as she describes the moment she heard her husband had died in the fire that claimed the astronauts of Apollo 1.

Strangely, director Mark Craig has chosen to use some faked shots of Gemini, Apollo and their launch vehicles in space. Considering the subject is well documented and photogenic, it seems an odd decision, unless audiences genuinely prefer mockumentary to a true story. The real stuff will always be much stronger than Hollywood-style mock-ups. In fact, the vintage stills in the film sometimes outshine the moving images.

“His story needs to be told, before there are no Apollo astronauts left to recount their experiences“

But this misplaced fakery doesn’t detract from what really happened in space. Cernan may have rehearsed his lines down the years, but they still deliver. “My failures taught us how to do it right,” he says of his Gemini 9 exertions. And he concludes that “it wasn’t just America going to the moon, it was the world”. For him to appreciate this point and outgrow the 1960s cold war ideology, which dictated so many of his choices, is no small achievement in itself.

Yet that competitive edge still shines through. A sequence where he’s shooting the breeze with his old friend Fred “Baldy” Baldwin, a former fellow navy pilot, verges on the schoolyard, their banter almost childish as they fight to point out who was the better at everything. At the same time, Cernan shows he can be as vulnerable as the next guy. When he reads aloud the letter he wrote to his daughter before his flight to the moon, the emotion is still raw.

You could pass him on the street and never notice him. Which is why his story – one of obvious achievement, but more than anything, one of derring-do – needs to be told, before there are no Apollo astronauts left to recount their experiences. Only 12 men walked on the moon and Cernan was the last to leave. One day he’ll be superseded, but nobody knows when that will be. And so for now he remains “the last man…”